Phenomenology, an early twentieth-century humanist philosophy inaugurated by Edmund Husserl, is the explicit and rigorous examination and description of consciousness. In the early 1980s, scholars of theater and performance began to employ analysis informed by phenomenology in their writing. These scholars found that phenomenology allowed them to describe their encounters with the performance event in a way unencumbered by the language-centered critical modes of psychoanalysis and deconstruction. Accordingly, phenomenological criticism asserted that a more immediate, visceral experience could be conveyed by suspending the "haze of secondary associations" that often mediates between the audience and the performance object.

Critics of this approach have pointed out that Husserl and other phenomenologists naïvely thought that language was a transparent system that reflected reality, though this belief has been strongly discredited by linguists and deconstructionist philosophers. This means, they argue, that even if phenomenology gives access to an encounter with the "essence" of a given art object, this encounter could never be conveyed to others in speech or writing without distortion or filtration of meaning. In response to this criticism, theater and performance scholars have adapted their methodology, citing later phenomenologists like Maurice Merleau-Ponty, whose work focuses on the importance of the body in forming consciousness, and disavowing the reductive formulations of Husserl.

1. Which of the following is implied by the author?

A. Phenomenology is a critical approach created by Edmund Husserl in the 1980s.
B. Linguistically minded critical approaches are thought by some scholars to preclude the description of a visceral encounter with a performance event.
C. Phenomenological critics have responded to the critiques of linguists and deconstructionist philosophers by disavowing phenomenology as a practice.
D. Linguists and deconstructionist philosophers have shown how language transparently reflects the real world.
E. Phenomenology is necessarily naïve concerning the way that language mediates communication.


2. According to the passage, each of the following is true of phenomenology EXCEPT:

A. It is a philosophy that was created decades before it was applied to theater and performance scholarship.
B. It has been considered a way to achieve a direct and immediate encounter with a performance event.
C. Its employment in performance scholarship has prompted some to question whether it can overcomethe complexities of language.
D. It involves cutting through a "haze of secondary associations" in order to access the essence of a performance event.
E. It has been employed to point out the way that language mediates a "haze of secondary associations."